Forty
years ago, on a clear, cold afternoon in Beijing, I followed President
Nixon onto the tarmac at Beijing's Capital Airport. I have a belated
confession to make. When I tried to sleep on Air Force One on the way to
Beijing, I was jolted awake by a nightmare. I dreamed that
Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek would be standing there with his old
political sparring partner and secret pen pal, Zhou Enlai. In my dream,
Chiang stepped forward to greet his former friend and political backer
Richard Nixon with a loudly sarcastic "long time, no see!" As we pulled
up to the shabby old structure that was then the only terminal at
Beijing's airport, I peered anxiously out the window. Others were elated
to see Premier Zhou emerge to greet us. I was merely relieved that he
was there pretty much by himself.

It's almost impossible today to recall the weirdness of that moment,
when an American president who had made a political career of reviling
Chinese communism strode without apology into the capital of the
People's Republic of China--a state and government the United States did
not recognize--to meet with leaders that Chiang Kai-shek--whom we
officially viewed as the legal president of all China--called "bandits at
the head of a bogus regime." I had entered the foreign service of the
United States and learned Chinese because I thought we would eventually
have to find a way to recruit China geopolitically. I was thrilled to be
the principal American interpreter as our president led an effort to do
exactly that. My job was to help him and his secretary of state discuss
with China's communists what to do about other, even more problematic
communists.

Last Tuesday, on the precise anniversary of that February 21, 1972,
personal introduction to Beijing, I was back there--not to try to
rearrange the world again but to make Chinese financiers aware of
specific investment opportunities in the United States. In 1972, it was
necessary for the leader of the capitalist world to save China from
Soviet communism. In 2012, the world looks to China to save capitalism,
and the world's capitalists flock to China in search of funds. How very
much was changed by the forces Nixon and Mao put in motion that
afternoon forty years ago.

There is no more Soviet Union; the bipolar world it helped define is
gone, as is the unipolar American moment its collapse created. The
famous Shanghai Communiqué of 1972 opened with a long recitation of the
irreconcilable differences between the United States and China on almost
every major international question of the time. Encounters between
Chinese and American leaders now produce far less dramatic laundry lists
of relatively minor and entirely manageable frictions as well as
grumbles, growls and whines about highly technical issues that
lower-level officials in both countries need to work on.

China has risen from poverty, impotence and isolation to retake its
premodern place atop the world economic order. The People's Republic is
now a major actor in global governance. It is fully integrated into
every aspect of the international system it once sought to overthrow
and, in some ways, more devoted to that system than we are. Forty years
ago, China's backwardness and vulnerability were the wonder of the
world. Now, the world envies and ponders the strategic implications of
China's rapidly growing wealth and power.

Reality, unlike ghosts in China, seldom travels in straight lines.
But if current trends advance along current lines, as early as 2022
China will have an economy that is one-third to two-fifths larger than
that of the United States. If China continues to spend roughly 2 percent
of its GDP (or 11 percent of its central-government budget) on its
military as it does now, ten years hence it will have a defense budget
on a par with ours today. Even with the exchange-rate adjustments that
will surely take place by 2022, $600 billion or so is likely to buy a
lot more in China than it can here. And all that money will be
concentrated on the defense of China and its periphery, whereas our
military, under current assumptions, will remain configured to project
our power simultaneously to every region of the globe, not just the
Asia-Pacific region.

What sort of relationship do we want with the emerging giant that is
China? The choice is not entirely ours, of course. China will have a lot
to say about it. To the extent we pay attention to the views of allies
like Japan, so will they. But we do have choices, and their consequences
are sufficiently portentous to suggest that they should be made after
due reflection, rather than as the result of strategic inertia.

Right now, the military-strategic choice we've made is clear. We are
determined to try to sustain the global supremacy handed to us by
Russia's involuntary default on its Cold War contest with us. In the
Asia-Pacific region, this means "full-spectrum dominance" up to China's
twelve-mile limit. In effect, having assumed the mission of defending
the global commons against all comers, we have decided to treat the
globe beyond the borders of Russia and China as an American sphere of
influence in which we hold sway and all others defer to our views of
what is and is not permissible.

This is a pretty ambitious posture on our part. China's defense
buildup is explicitly designed to counter it. China has made it clear
that it will not tolerate the threat to its security represented by a
foreign military presence at its gates when these foreign forces are
engaged in activities designed to probe Chinese defenses and choreograph
a way to penetrate them. There's no reason to assume that China is any
less serious about this than we would be if faced with similarly
provocative naval and air operations along our frontiers. So, quite
aside from our on-again, off-again mutual posturing over the issue of
Taiwan's relationship to the rest of China, we and the Chinese are
currently headed for some sort of escalating military confrontation.

At the same time, most Americans recognize that our own prosperity is
closely linked to continued economic development in China. In recent
years, China has been our fastest growing export market. It is also our
largest source of manufactured imports, including many of the high-tech
items we take pride in having designed but do not make. And we know we
have to work with China to address the common problems of mankind.

So our future prosperity has come to depend on economic
interdependence with a nation we are also setting ourselves up to do
battle with. And, at the same time, we hope to cooperate with that
nation to assure good global governance. Pardon me if I perceive a
contradiction or two in this China policy. It looks to me more like the
vector of competing political impulses than the outcome of rational
decisionmaking.

Of course, no Washington audience can be the least surprised that
capitol confusion, intellectual inertia and the prostitution of policy
to special interests, rather than strategic reasoning, determine policy.
Why should China be an exception to other issues? But even those of us
long calloused by life within the Beltway ought to be able to see that
we've got a problem. Our approach to managing our interactions with
China does not compute.

Actually, we have a much bigger problem than that presented by the
challenge of dealing with a rising China. We cannot hope to sustain our
global hegemony even in the short term without levels of expenditure we
are unprepared to tax ourselves to support. Worse, the logic of the sort
of universal sphere of influence we aspire to administer requires us to
treat the growth of others' capabilities relative to our own as direct
threats to our hegemony. This means we must match any and all
improvements in foreign military power with additions to our own. It is
why our military-related expenditures have grown to exceed those of the
rest of the world combined. There is simply no way that such a
militaristic approach to national security is affordable in the long
term, no matter how much it may delight defense contractors.

In this context, I fear that the so-called "pivot" to Asia will turn
out be an unresourced bluff. It's impressive enough to encourage China
to spend more on its military, but what it means, in practice, is that
we will cut military commitments to Asia less than we cut commitments
elsewhere. That is, we will do this if the Middle East comes to need
less attention than we have been giving it. At best, the "pivot"
promises more or less more of the same in the Indo-Pacific region. This
would be a tough maneuver to bring off even if we had our act together
both at home and in the Middle East. But we do not have our act together
at home. Our position in West Asia and North Africa is not improving.
And some Americans are currently actively advocating war with Iran,
intervention in Syria, going after Pakistan, and other misguided
military adventures in West and South Asia.

So, what's the affordable alternative approach to sustaining
stability in the Asia-Pacific region as China rises? My guess is that
it's to be found in adjustments in our psychology. We need to get over
World War II and the Cold War and focus on the realities of the present
rather than the past.

Japan initially defeated all other powers in the Asia-Pacific,
including the United States. We then cleaned Japan's clock and filled
the resulting strategic vacuum. We found our regional preeminence so
gratifying that we didn't notice as the vacuum we had filled proceeded
to disappear. Japan restored itself. Southeast Asians came together in
the Second Indochina War. ASEAN incorporated Indochina and Myanmar.
India rose from its post-colonial sick bed and strode forward. Indonesia
did the same.

But we have continued to behave as though there is an Asian-Pacific
power vacuum only we can fill. And, as China's rise has begun to shift
the strategic equilibrium in the region, we have stepped forward to
restore it. We seem to think that, if we Americans don't provide it,
there can be no balance or peace in Asia. But, quite aside from the fact
that there was a balance and peace in the region long before the United
States became a Pacific power, this overlooks the formidable
capabilities of re-risen and rising powers like Japan, South Korea,
India, Indonesia and Vietnam. It is a self-realizing strategic delusion
that powers a self-licking ice-cream cone.

If Americans step forward to balance China for everyone else in the
region, the nations of the Indo-Pacific will hang back and let us take
the lead. And if we put ourselves between them and China, they will not
just rely on us to back their existing claims against China, they will
up the ante. It cannot make sense to empower the Philippines, Vietnam
and others to pick our fights with China for us.

The bottom line is that the return of Japan, South Korea and China to
wealth and power and the impressive development of other countries in
the region should challenge us to rethink the entire structure of our
defense posture in Asia. Unable to live by our wallets, we must learn to
live by our wits. In my view, President Nixon's "Guam Doctrine" pointed
the way. We need to find ways to ask Asians to do more in their own
interest and their own defense. Our role should be to back them as our interests
demand, not to pretend that we care more about their national-security
interests or understand these better than they do, still less to push
them aside to take on defense tasks on their behalf.

We need to think very differently than we have done over the nearly
seven decades since the end of World War II. To be sure, a less
forward-leaning American approach to securing our interests in Asia
would require painful adjustments in Japan's and South Korea's
dependencies on us as well as in our relations with the member states of
ASEAN and India and Pakistan. It would almost certainly require an even
stronger alliance with Australia. Paradoxically, it would be more than a
little unnerving for China, which has come to like most aspects, even
if not everything, about the status quo.

It is not in our interest to withdraw from Asia. But, more than six
decades after we deployed to stabilize Cold War Asia, we should not be
afraid to adapt our strategy and deployments to its new post-Cold War
realities. Both the strategic circumstances of our times and the more
limited resources available to us demand serious reformulation of
current policies. These policies cannot effectively meet the evolving
challenges of the world the Nixon visit to China--forty years ago this
week--helped to create.

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The news came in a letter from Donald Trump to Kim Jong Un, the full text of which is here:

Dear Mr. Chairman:

We greatly appreciate your time, patience, and effort with respect to our recent negotiations and discussions relative to a summit long sought by both parties, which was scheduled to take place on June 12 in Singapore. We were informed that the meeting was requested by North Korea, but that to us is totally irrelevant. I was very much looking forward to being there with you. Sadly, based on the tremendous anger and open hostility displayed in your most recent statement, I feel it is inappropriate, at this time, to have this long-planned meeting. Therefore, please let this letter serve to represent that the Singapore summit, for the good of both parties, but to the detriment of the world, will not take place. You talk about your nuclear capabilities, but ours are so massive and powerful that I pray to God they will never have to be used.

I felt a wonderful dialogue was building up between you and me, and ultimately, it is only that dialogue that matters. Some day, I look very much forward to meeting you. In the meantime, I want to thank you for the release of the hostages who are now home with their families. That was a beautiful gesture and was very much appreciated.

If you change your mind having to do with this most important summit, please do not hesitate to call me or write. The world, and North Korea in particular, has lost a great opportunity for lasting peace and great prosperity and wealth. This missed opportunity is a truly sad moment in history.